Just when I think nothing new could possibly be done with the zombie genre Dying Light, a new game from the makers of Dead Island, pops up on the radar.

The game essentially looks to be Mirror’s Edge with zombies. You’re a very nimble survivor tasked with freerunning in first-person around a large open world on a search for supplies before it gets dark. Because zombies are more dangerous in the dark of course. Duh. From the look of things the game either won’t contain guns, or they’ll be quite rare, but the game is promising you can use pretty much anything as a melee weapon.

No trailer yet, but you can hit the jump for the screenshots…

The game will be coming to “next gen” and current gen consoles (except the Wii U probably) like all 3rd party games. So, what do you think? A much needed breath of fresh air for zombie games, or just a random unwieldy mashup of genres?

Want it, now. I’ve always thought an open world zombie game could be amazing if it were done in a style akin to Grand Theft Auto, but so far nothing has reached the level I’m looking for. Dead Island got really boring, really quick to me. Give me a whole city, cars to drive, missions, etc.

I’d like to play one where you have to survive the first day. It’s just the first day over and over again — but the maps and situations are endless. Disney World, movie theater, elementary school, Niagara Falls, little league baseball game, subway, etc. And it’s not just a hack and slash — you’re actively trying to secure your environment, save other people, gather resources, find out what’s going on, etc.

Think of it as a training simulator for the actual thing when it happens.

Okay, I’m an oldschool zombie fan. And when I say oldschool, I mean I loved zombie movies since I was a kid in the early 80s. But even I’m getting sick of zombies, mostly because people always want to diverge from the Romero canon and fuck up all that is / was great about zombies. I’d get in to that in greater detail but it’s a complete rant unto itself.
Anyhow, screw zombies. And screw open-world sandbox single players. What someone needs to do is a make a post-apocalyptic MMORPG. Map out the entire North Eastern US (or similarly sized area), make it look and feel like 20 Years After People and let players populate it. I wouldn’t even want their to be NPCs. You start the game by waking up in a completely random place and, bam, you better start doing everything you’d have to do to survive a real post-apocalyptic world; scavenge for food, search for (or make) weapons for self-defense, find a defensible location to sleep and, of course, everyone else is out there doing the exact same thing. You could join up with other people, or not, and get up to all kinds of shit in a world like that. Give me that over endless waves of computer controlled zombies any day.